Art, Politics, and Modernism

Modernism's promise that art could transform social life never fully dissolved; scholars working at the intersection of art, politics, and aesthetics continue to examine how visual and performing arts engage power, provoke dissent, and produce new forms of collective experience. Much of the current debate centers on relational and participatory practices—works that dissolve the boundary between artist and audience—and on whether such gestures constitute genuine political intervention or simply aestheticize social relations without changing them. Globalization has added further pressure, raising pointed questions about whose aesthetic frameworks count as universal and how artists navigate between local cultural contexts and transnational markets. Open problems include how to evaluate activist art without reducing it to its messaging, and what critical theory adequate to a genuinely pluralist, post-Western modernism would actually look like.

Works

157,757

Total citations

327,035

Keywords

Contemporary ArtAestheticsRelational AestheticsArt TheoryGlobalizationActivist Art